


Immobile

by fennui (paperweight)



Series: 15woes>Ophiuchus>Severus Snape [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Gen, Paralysis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-21
Updated: 2017-05-21
Packaged: 2018-11-03 07:35:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10962648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperweight/pseuds/fennui
Summary: After Nagini strikes.





	Immobile

**Author's Note:**

> 2nd person POV isn't usually my thing, but sometimes it just happens. So, Reader, for the next 500 words, you are Severus Snape.

The pain is distant now as you feel your body shutting down. The neurotoxins take their toll and your blood turns to set jelly in your veins. You are suffocating from the inside out and you experience a strange weightless euphoria as your vision clouds at the edges, yet as you drift away you cling to that field of warm green and allow the comfort of it to soothe the battered remnants of your soul. 

It is forever--it is no time at all until you are next aware of being. You find that you have nothing to attach your awareness to except your thoughts themselves. It is dark and there is a stretch of endless blankness all around and inside. 

You’re not sure there is an ‘all around’ or an ‘inside’. 

You’re not in pain; you feel no warm or cold; no rough or smooth; your body does not feel present and you think that ought feel troubling, but it seems too abstract. This, you think, must be what death is, and you wonder if this is to be your eternity. As your awareness drifts away once more you hope—or think you should—that there will eventually be either more or less to it. 

The next time you become aware in the darkness, you can feel a strange, though familiar, tingling all over your surface and you briefly become distracted by the knowledge that you apparently still have skin—are still contained within it. Maybe. Then you experience a creeping sense of unease as the same tingling—like the memory of a wash cloth too vigorously applied—spreads across your scalp. Suddenly you are flung into one of your most humiliating memories: you are surrounded by other first years flinging cleaning charms like hexes at your sallow skin and lank, greasy hair. Taunting you—laughing. You want to make it stop, to get way… Now, as then, you are immobile. Your limbs will not obey you, you are paralyzed. Petrified. Your heart races—it pounds painfully in your chest, robbing you of breaths you were not aware of still needing until just now. You want to cry out: Please … no more. Stop! But you have no voice. 

Then suddenly, miraculously … 

_“Stop!”_

Was that you? Did you call out? 

_“Stop, can’t you see you’re hurting him?”_

The voice. That voice. His voice. Once so unwelcome, now merely unexpected. 

You feel a gentle, calloused hand grip yours as he offers murmured reassurances. You finally feel anchored in your body, aware of all your limbs, of too heavy eyelids, of your fingers twitching under his… And as his voice washes all around you in soothing waves, as once you were soothed by a field of warm green, your awareness begins to drift again and you are embraced back into sleep. Only sleep. 

_“You’re safe now. Nothing else will hurt you, I promise.”_

_It is a bold promise from an impetuous young man, but you are inclined to trust it. You sleep._

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fill for my [15woes](https://15woes.dreamwidth.org/) prompt table: [Ophiucus>Severus Snape](https://fennui.dreamwidth.org/14137.html).


End file.
